


you're the one i pray to every night

by elainebarrish



Category: How to Get Away with Murder
Genre: F/F, THIS FOR BETSY IT IS VERY LATE I AM SO SORRY, they're so gay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-05
Updated: 2017-02-05
Packaged: 2018-09-22 07:03:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9589922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elainebarrish/pseuds/elainebarrish
Summary: She deserves the softest touch your shaking hands can give her, and you concentrate on that as she turns her head and kisses your shaking palm, her eyes dark and inscrutable in the shadows of the room.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [helenecixous](https://archiveofourown.org/users/helenecixous/gifts).



> I'M SO SORRY HOW LATE THIS IS !!!! TITLE FROM A PHANTOGRAM SONG I CAN'T REMEMBER WHICH ONE !!!! HAPPY EXTREMELY BELATED BIRTHDAY I REALLY HOPE YOU LIKE THIS RIP

You love her, you really really do, and you’ve done terrible things in the name of that love, would do them again if you had to, just to protect her, just to make sure that she continues being able to do what she does best. You do that from the sidelines, from slightly behind and to the left of her, and you don’t let yourself entertain thoughts of how she needs you, how she wouldn’t know what to do without you. She was doing just fine before and she’ll do just fine after, so you stay quiet and collect up the gentle words that she gives you like they’re stars, or diamonds, like they’re liquid gold. You gather up her smiles, you collect her soft moments, her quiet requests, and you don’t think about how she knows exactly what to do to to get you to stay, don’t think about how good she is at manipulating people into doing what she wants them to. You think about her soft in the morning, eyes barely open as she shuffles to the coffee pot, rubbing her face as she yawns, you think about her letting you watch her take her armour off, you think about when she’s not had enough to drink to be mean but her smiles are easy, they’re warm, and she lets you dance with her in her living room, your eyes distracted by her hips and her hands and you feel like you can barely look her in the face. You think about when she invites you to have a drink with her and you talk about the case but she also teases you about your lack of boyfriend, asks about whether you’ve finally made a move on that cute girl at the coffee shop near you that you’d vaguely mentioned last week.

You wake up with a blanket on you, a cup of coffee on the table in front of you, steam still rising in the early morning sun, and you look up to see Annalise sat opposite, holding her own coffee, freshly showered but still in her robe, her armour not yet in place.

“Aren’t you too old to be sleeping on files?” She asks, and you frown as you unstick your face from some casenotes and sit up, patting your hair and attempting to discreetly wipe away any drool that might have escaped.

“Probably.” You agree, smiling blearily, picking up your coffee, inhaling the smell and hoping it’ll help to enable you to open your eyes fully. “Thank you for this.” Your voice is soft but so is her smile as she nods in acceptance, and you take a moment to drink her in, the sunlight streaming through the windows because you never closed the curtains, her expression warm and only for you, her eyes kind in a way that part of you had forgotten they could be.

“Did you find anything?” You sigh in response, thinking about the long fruitless search of the night before.

“Not yet, but I know there’s precedent, I just can’t find the case.”

“I’ll get the kids to search for it when they get in.” She says, smiling still, and you laugh. “You, on the other hand, should get home and shower and change.”

“Oh, are you sure?” You question, because you’ve gone two days in a row in the same clothes on enough occasions that you hadn’t expected the opportunity, especially as you’re not appearing in court today.

“I’m sure the boss can cope without you for a couple of hours.” You laugh again, pleased because this feels like before, before everything had started falling down around the both of you. She’s still smiling as you down your coffee, black with sugar, exactly how you like it, stand up and stretch, slowly collecting your phone and your purse and all the things that had somehow got scattered across the room last night, but she waves you away from tidying up.

“Don’t worry about that, someone else will do it.” And you smile because you both know that that person won’t be her, because she’s still Annalise, even though she’s sitting on the sofa with her legs up and the sunlight making her glow, even though she’s smiling at you. “And Bonnie?” she says and you turn, waiting for her to ruin this perfect morning, and she looks at you like she knows that you expect that. “Don’t forget to consume something that other than coffee, I know that you forgot about dinner again.” It should sound stern but she’s looking at you so softly, like she cares about you so much she doesn’t know how to express it, so you just nod mutely and then turn from the room, letting yourself out with your head spinning. 

You linger on that memory for a while, remind yourself of it when she’s stressed and tired and maybe what some would call unnecessarily harsh, but it gets the results that she wants, that she expects from all of you, and you don’t think pushing people to be their best is an intrinsically bad thing. That’s what you tell yourself when you’re reeling from one of her unthinking remarks anyway, what you tell yourself while you’re sat at your desk in her house working your seventh seventeen hour day in a row because none of you can crack this case, what you tell yourself when you finally get to bed after one of those cases is finished and you lay there and realise that she hasn’t spared you a kind moment in weeks.

Stressed Annalise is, in some ways, your least favourite iteration of her; she is snappy and she is mean and she doesn’t let any of you sleep any more than she does, which is honestly not enough hours for any of you to survive on. This is why you work even harder than she does, you tell yourself, just to get through this case, through this week, not for the soft relieved smiles when you hand her the right strategy, when you find the right case to use as a precedent, when you order Chinese and guess correctly that it’s a spring roll kind of evening. You have to work for these moments, you have to push yourself, and sometimes (most of the time) that’s a reward within itself. You are your best when you’re proving yourself to her, when you’re pushing yourself for her, and she knows that. She knows that you will always rise to the challenge, and you’re always surprised at what you can do while she just nods like she knew, like she knows what you’re capable of. Like she knows that you’re capable of anything. You want to believe that, want to believe that she believes that.

You win that case, and the next one, and the one after it. You can practically see Annalise relax a little, see her settle back into what she has been before Lila, before Sam had shown who he really was, before she’d had Wes remind her of secrets she would have preferred had stayed hidden. You see her start to believe that all of you can get away with this, that these idiots are going to graduate somehow and take their secrets with them when they disappear on to some of the best law firms in the country, where they will undoubtedly continue to sleep with the least appropriate people they can find. You’ll be glad to see the back of them, and that’s mostly because they’ve made everything as hard for Annalise as they possibly could, because they challenge her at every turn, because they refuse to believe that she’s the one that’s going to get them out of this, even though she’s proved that she’s the only that can on multiple occasions, even though she’s cleared up after every stupid decision they’ve made.

She’s smiling as she throws a case file on your desk, as she tells you that you’re taking point on this one, and you just figure that it’s an easy one, that she took it purposefully for you to practise on, but the brief is not at all what you would call simple, even at just your first glance.

“Annalise, I -” you pause, your brain already working, even as you tell her that you don’t know if you’re ready.

“I wouldn’t give it to you if I didn’t believe that you can do it,” she replies and disappears before you can continue arguing further.

You’re buried in precedents, in trawling through past cases, and you’ve not even spoken to the defendant yet, because you’ve always loved throwing past rulings in the Judge’s face. Annalise comes out of her office and raises her eyebrow as she makes her way to the coffee pot, and you know what that means; something you’re doing in not how she would do it, and she is resisting saying anything, she’s trying to give you this moment to teach yourself.

“What?” you ask, eventually, tired of her uniquely obnoxious silence in the kitchen.

“Nothing, nothing,” she’s smiling as she goes to disappear into her office. “Just I would have thought that you would start by talking to the defendant.”

“That’s what you always do, yes,” you frown. “But I just thought if we could find a firm precedent then we wouldn’t really need to.”

“You still need their instructions.” She reminds you, and you sigh because both of you know that unless they have a surprise planned there’s plenty of time to get them.

“If I’m taking the lead and you don’t have another case on then does that mean that you’re part of my team?” you ask, a smile spreading across your face as she raises her eyebrows and then nods.

“I suppose it does. My talents are at your disposal.” You ignore the almost… flirty tone of voice like you always do, and grab your coat.

“Alright, you’re coming with me to interview them.”

“Yes ma’am,” she smirks as you roll your eyes.

You win the case, and this win is uniquely your own like very few have been. Annalise didn’t even have to bail you out last minute and you’re the one that devised the strategy, that executed it, and you didn’t even have to hold back evidence or engage in some of the slightly shadier behaviour that you’ve all just accepted is part of Annalise’s approach. You don’t think the person that went home today because of you is necessarily innocent, but you don’t think about that, don’t let it sully what is one of the biggest wins of your career. You get back to the house, intending to clear up and file the case away, intending to declare it done in every way, but Annalise has opened a bottle of wine, and she pours you a glass as you walk through the door, emerging from the kitchen holding two glasses with a smile to see you collapsed on the sofa. You wish you’d checked your lipstick before you got out of the car, because she looks amazing, because she always looks amazing, and the relief and victory in your bones makes you want to pull her close and paint her lips with your favourite shade of red. You instead take the wine with a quiet thank you and admire that even for this she’s dressed up; you’re pretty sure that dress isn’t what she was wearing when you left for the courthouse earlier, and you wonder if she knows that that dark purple/burgundy is one of your favourite colours on her or if it was just luck, if she just knows how good she looks. You get completely distracted by by the sway of her hips, by her upper arms with their stretch marks and the muscles defined by the weight of the glass of wine she holds, her calves accentuated by the heels that she’s wearing even though she doesn’t need to be. You know that Annalise uses her looks as armour but you don’t understand what she’s protecting herself from, what she’s nervous for tonight, here in this living room that isn’t really hers, as she sits on the sofa next to you but just out of reach, and you’re glad for it because you don’t know if you can resist in this moment.

“So I heard it went well.” She says, smiling, and you wonder if one of the kids called her or if she asked someone from the courthouse to, wonder if she planned this, whatever this is.

“It did.” You reply, and you can’t help the smile that spreads across your face in response to hers.

“From what I heard it was a near flawless performance from you.”

“It went off with relatively few hitches,” you say diplomatically.

“I told you that you need to believe in yourself.”

“You just enjoy a chance to say I told you so.” You’re smiling, your voice quiet, and you hope that you’re not blushing because you can’t take praise from her, have never been able to find the correct way to respond to her.

“Everybody enjoys that,” she smiles, softly, looking at you in a way you’ve never seen before. “But I also enjoy being able to give you an opportunity to surprise yourself.”

“Annalise, I just wanted to say that I really do appreciate -” her hand on your arm stops you, surprises you into silence, and you feel like you can barely think because she’s leaning forward while still smiling softly, while still somehow glowing.

“You don’t need to thank me for letting you prove yourself to you. It’s something I should have been giving you many more opportunities to do than I have.”

“Well, there’s been a lot going on,” you manage weakly and she laughs.

“Yes, there has. But I’ve let it mean that I’ve neglected you. This case was to apologise for that.” She’s still smiling, and she shrugs a little as she sits back, and you have to stop yourself from trying to follow her warmth.

“I always work the best when I’m under pressure from you,” you say, and you don’t know why it feels like a confession because she knows that, knows that you’ve never performed for anyone like how you’ve performed for her.

She smiles and you sip your wine nervously because that smile seems so much like smiles you’ve seen her give other people but not you, the kind of smile that you think you’ve maybe been waiting your whole life for. She sips her wine too and you fancy that it stains her lips, that where they meet is a deep, dark ruby, so much darker than the colour you stain your own. You feel like there’s a meaning to this, that there’s something Annalise wants or needs, or that she has some sort of aim in mind and the only thing that you can think of is promotion somewhere away from her, but her gaze isn’t telling you that, that smile isn’t telling you that, and her eyes are trying to tell you something that you don’t understand.

“And I’ve never been prouder of someone.” She says, and it’s soft, quiet, serious, and she’s leaning forwards again, she’s inside your personal space, and you think that it always feels like she’s intruding on your space because she always knows, she knows everything about you. You feel the blush and are helpless to stop it, helpless in the face of the way she smiles at the spreading pink, at the cocky curve of her mouth. You want to kiss her all over again. “That’s why I took it upon myself to celebrate with you.” She pauses and looks at you, and it’s somehow predatory and targeted and you almost gasp at the pressure of it. “What do you want?” She asks, and you don’t pause, don’t think, don’t breathe.

“I’d like to kiss you.” Your voice is breathless and you don’t know why but you also do know because you feel like you’ve been holding your breath since she walked into the room, since the first time you noticed her hips or her calves, since the first time she smiled and it was just for you. The smile she was already wearing spreads and you recognise it now, it’s the one she chooses for when she goes on the charm offensive, the one that makes men drop things to do what she wants them to, but also the one she wears when she actually wants them to want her, the one that you couldn’t recognise because you never thought it would be aimed at you.

“Bonnie, if you want something, take it.” She says, and you release a shaky breath, put your glass down, carefully cup her face in your hands. She deserves the softest touch your shaking hands can give her, and you concentrate on that as she turns her head and kisses your shaking palm, her eyes dark and inscrutable in the shadows of the room. You kiss her carefully, gently, like you’re scared of breaking her, and she slides a hand around your waist and you gasp into her mouth and she smiles against your lips. She kisses you gently in return, her lips soft, letting you lead, and you realise that she did plan this, realise that she’d expected the wine to work even if the victory didn’t, and your blood sings with the sort of rush you never thought would get to be yours, and you smile into her kiss and pull her closer.


End file.
